Party Sponsors You rocked my week and I am looking for professional help with the amount of drinking I did because of you. Friendly, fun, functional, I met hundreds of great folks waiting to get in and then drinking on your dollar.

SXSW Team The folks putting on the event did an absolutely amazing job. I have nothing but amazing things to say.

Big Walls With ArrowsBloxes rock, and we got to see them all weekend with huge arrows pointing our way around the panels. But the things do so much more, such as act as table structures. The look damn cool, I want 50.

SocialThing Largely a great launch, great job to all the hard work of Brian, Ben, Matt, Wade, Josh and others.

Twitter You didn’t crash, and I thank you.

Colorado Companies The Colorado Interactive Party (sponsored by PocketFuzz and Lijit) was one of the hottest parties of the weekend (with a line to get in of over 500). The mountainous state is really blowing up in the tech scene with the emergence of Foundry Group, TechStars, Lijit, SocialThing, VCWear, Startup Weekend, PocketFuzz, SurveyMonkey, and many many others. I called two of my companies out there, and kinda feel weird about doing that.

The Unicorn Matt showed up to my panel wearing a unicorn suit. We invited him onstage and he rocked it. He even acted like a rock star. Brilliant. It was talked about quite a bit during the week. Stunt gone big.

Big Losers

FaceBook Hand picking an interviewer to lob softball questions to your CEO is a good idea to who at your company? Sorry Lacy, but you seemed more awkward than Mark, who gets a free pass by being a developer. If you don’t want to answer the hard questions on your company in a public forum, don’t take the keynote, or do something fun and creative there. By this I mean do a demo, bring some light to some of the creative reasons, talk about scaling, features, challenges and media coverage. The folks watching left with a much worse impression of who is running FaceBook, and what they are doing with all that data. Losing your users trust is your base crumbling.

TechCrunch Combine blown coverage of a huge keynote (with no personal coverage at the event?) with random stabs at the bloggers, designers, developers and musicians that came. Michael, you know you wanted to be here.

Micah Baldwin The man had to walk over a mile to get his tattoo. With this much walking, he (being a douchebag) must have had a few pound weight loss.

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About Andrew Hyde

I’m a vagabond and a minimalist that sold everything but 15 things and went on a big trip (82 countries). My most read and respected blog posts are here. This blog has reached millions with writing about minimalism, startups, design, culture and events.